Tuesday, September 13, 2016

From ‘Finding the Demon’s Fiddle. On the Trail of the Ravanhatta’ by Patrick Jered

So many worlds, so
much to do, so little done, such things to be.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

I met a man who lost
his mind

In some lost place, I
had to find

‘Follow me,’ the wise
man said

But he walked behind

-L. Cohen, Teachers

The musical instrument created by Ravana – certainly the
wickedest demon in all of Hindu scripture – has been employed for hundreds of
years by a sect of nomadic priests called Bhopas. They play the instrument as
part of their liturgy, to accompany themselves singing the praises of Pabuji,
an obscure god. Bhopa priests have been almost the exclusive guardians of the
ravanhatta for more than half a millennium.

….an eminent and highly respected musicologist, Professor
Joep Bor…….. he said, …he was about to publish a major piece of research,
tracking the history of bowed instruments back to ancient India, and to the
ravanhattha itself. ……He had become convinced, he said, that it was the
earliest bowed instrument still in existence, and as such could be considered a
direct ancestor of the violin and all other bowed instruments…….Temples in
India, he explained, were crammed with carvings of all manner of musicians with
clear depictions of their instruments, but unfortunately very few were clearly
of bowed instruments. The problem, it seemed, was that bowed instruments had
long been associated with the vulgar pleasures of the so-called lower castes.
Even the exquisite Indian box-violin, the sarangi, had only recently been
accepted as a classical instrument……as for evidence in literature, the best
place to look would be in Sri Lankan or South Indian Tamil documents. There was
a wealth of Tamil literature that had never been translated into Hindi, let
alone into a European language……..

In the West, the noises associated with the clearing of
one’s tubes in readiness to spit are considered to be socially unacceptable.
However, noisily blowing a slug of snot into a piece of paper, even in the
middle of a busy restaurant, is considered quite normal. In the Netherlands it
has recently become acceptable – almost de rigeur
– to use a toothpick after eating at a restaurant, as long as you use one hand
to shield the proceedings from the casual observer, and to avoid flicking
stringy bits of meat into their eyes…….In some cultures belching loudly at the
conclusion of a good meal is considered complimentary to the host. In
ultra-polite Japan, one would never dream of eating soba noodles without
copious amounts of slurping, while in polite Indian society this would be
unthinkably rude.

……Lawrence Durrell states that loneliness and time are,
‘those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.’

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;

that is where they should be.

Now put the foundations under them.

D. H. Thoreau

……..the most celebrated par
painter of all time, Sri Lal Joshi ……He is regarded as an oracle of knowledge
about Pabuji worship, and his pars
are considered to be singularly powerful. …his eldest son has a burgeoning
international reputation…….

The epic of Pabuji is a long and complex tale of heroism and
valour, passion and revenge, that takes place in feudal Marwar in the early 14th
century. The epic takes 36 hours for a Bhopa to recite…….

By the 14th century, the Sri Lankans (as they are
now known) had already been keeping detailed historical chronicles for many
hundreds of years. The Mahavamsa
chronicle begins to record Sri Lankan history around the 3rd century
BCE. There is no historical record of a ruler of Lanka called Ravana in the
days of Pabuji.

There is a considerable body of evidence pointing to the
likelihood that Pabuji is not merely a mythological character but that he was
also a historical figure…….there is credible evidence to suggest that Pabuji
Rathore not only existed, but actually did introduce camels into what is now
called Rajasthan……..At the start of the fourteenth century, camels were not
entirely unknown in India. Muslim invaders like Mahmud Ghazni and Ala-ud-din
Khilji were known to have used camels as beasts of burden during their earlier
incursions into Hindustan. But the rarity of camels is indicated by the fat
that Ibn Battuta presented one as a gift to the Delhi ruler Muhammed Tughluq
(1325-1351). At the time it was regarded as a most curious creature.

So in Pabuji’s day, camels were known in India, but were
considered to be wildly exotic, alien beasts. However, shortly after the time
of Pabuji, camel herding became widespread in the Thar Desert region
surrounding Pabuji’s court at Kolu. And it is no coincidence that Pabuji’s
faithful follower Harmal, who had been sent on the sortie to locate the camels
in ‘Lanka’ …was son of a Raika tribesman…….Since the days of Pabuji, the Raika
tribes have been the traditional camel herders of the region, and the
semi-nomadic Raika are, to this day, Pabuji’s most devoted worshippers………John
Smith intriguingly mentioned that some Bhopas believed that ‘Lanka’ was
somewhere to the west of the Indus River, in what is now
Pakistan………Ravana…….Bhopa priests generally do believe that the ravanhattha
………was invented by the demon

The next morning in
the grey dawn, the Englishmen rose up and shook the sand of Jeypore from his
feet …wondering whether a year in Jeypore would be sufficient to exhaust its
interest ……

Rudyard Kipling

There is a crack, a crack, in everything

That’s how the light gets in

L. Cohen

Only a monotheistic religion like Christianity can really be
monodiabolistic. Hinduism has too many gods for a single devil to be able to
handle. But it has many demons. The Rakshasas were an entire race of
demons………They would kill for pleasure and devour human flesh. They would defile
the Vedic offerings of priests and lure children away…..the biggest and baddest
demon of them all was Ravana……

Ravana …….meets his end at the conclusion of the orthodox
Hindu scripture the Ramayana – long
before the Epic of Pabuji takes place; a couple of thousand years earlier. In
its simplest terms, the Ramayana is a
fable of good prevailing over evil, although in that very Indian fashion, there
is a gray area where good is not always completely good, and bad not always
entirely bad.

……..earlier than the 3rd century BCE, burial was
the custom in the South.

Bhopal revealed itself to be a laid-back, unhurried place
hugging the curves of the lakes. Banyans and lazy old palm trees swayed and
rustled in the breeze. People strolled along the promenade, not particularly
going anywhere. It was unusual to see people walking for pleasure in India.
Were it not for the high density of minarets, I might well have believed I was
in the region of Nice or St Tropez. It had all the charm of a Mediterranean
town with a promenade to rival the Boulevard
des Anglais.

Tamal, like all drivers I have encountered in India,
considers a road map to be an interesting curiosity printed solely for the
amusement of foreigners.

In Europe the place would most likely be considered as a
site of considerable historical and archaeological interest. In India, it is
just another site of yet another hill settlement, littered with the religious
detritus of another age.

The smashing of coconuts and bisecting of pumpkins and
watermelons at Indian temples was introduced to replace the breaking of human
skulls and beheadings when such practices were outlawed a couple of hundred
years ago. The basic idea, Uttra told me was that in order to be granted
something from the cosmos, you first had to give something to it, in order to
maintain the cosmic equilibrium. At the Kalighat temple in Kolkata, where one
of the toes of the goddess Kali is believed to be preserved, a boy was
sacrificed every day for hundreds of years as an offering. Nowadays its only
young goats that have their throats cut at Kalighat.

The first Westerner to write about Pabuji, studied and
translated Charan poetry in the early 20th century. His name was
Luigi Pio Tessitori, an Italian scholar……….His influence in Rajasthan is
enormous…..Charan poetry was written in the ancient Marwari language of Dingal.
Its unclear if Dingal ever existed as an independent language outside the
martial epics of the Charan.

….The Taj Mahal……the most damning criticism…..came from
Aldous Huxley……He deconstructed the Taj with his knowledge of architecture -
…..sneering that, ‘the marble is only a veneer over cheaper masonry, not
solid’. But he particularly hated the minarets…… ‘…..are among the ugliest
structures ever erected by human hands.’….final word on the matter was, ‘….it
seems to be that anyone who professes an ardent admiration for the Taj must
look at it without having any standards of excellence in his mind.’

…if you lie down with dogs…..you get up with fleas….

Oddly, the people I encountered who trumpeted the virtues of
the caste system always seemed to be at the top of it.

Professor Bor…..argues convincingly that the playing bow has
its origins in India, and that ravanhattha is the decendent of one of the very
earliest of bowed instruments….he presents a startling photograph of a wall
carving from the Agastyeshvara temple in Southern India clearly depicting a
figure playing an instrument almost identical to a modern-day ravanhattha. The
carving has been dated at 10th-to-13th century. To be
depicted in a temple, the instrument must surely have had a long-established
position in society…….who knows what descriptions are still hidden away in the
wealth of early southern Indian Tamil literature.

Once the epic had been set to music, as Komal Kothari
believed, it became very difficult to alter. A story that is recited can be
easily modified by the teller, as the oral Ramayana
had, producing a plethora of different versions. But words that fit to music
are much more difficult to change, especially if they rely on rhymes to carry
the song. And so the versions of the Epic of Pabuji as sung by different Bhopa
families from different parts of Rajasthan remained virtually identical for
half a millennium.

I found it an intriguing idea that the demonic origins of
the ravanhattha might be the source of the western apocrypha associating the
violin with the devil……The earliest clear association I could find between the
devil and the violin concerned the Italian violin virtuoso and composer
Giuseppe Tartini. In 1713 Tartini had described having a vivid dream in which
he made a pact with the devil, trading his soul for the Devil’s favour. During
the dream, the devil had played a remarkable piece of music on Tartini’s
violin. When the composer awoke, he did his best to write the piece down. The
resulting sonata, The Devil’s Trill –
a technically challenging piece for the violin – was a great success, although
Tartini believed his notation barely did justice to the music the devil had
actually performed.……So the western association between Lucifer and the fiddle
– as far as I could discern – is most likely no more than three hundred or so
years old, with no obvious origin in Indian mythology. However, the western
association between the devil and music stretches back much further than this.
In mediaeval Europe a chord, the so-called ‘devli’s interval’ or triton, was
banned by the early Christian church since it was believed to call up
unmentionable (i.e. sexual) impulses (i.e. the devil) in the listener. Not
surprisingly, the discordant triton – diabolus
in musica – is frequently used in Jazz. Jimi Hendrix based the opening riff
of Purple Haze around one.

He looks with curiosity at the long, narrow aluminium case………but
doesn’t ask whats inside. In some ways he’s a very atypical Indian. Complete
strangers have asked me in the street what it contains…..

And, when you want something,

all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.

Paulo Coehlo, The
Alchemist

In Rajasthan there are degrees of gods. The so-called ‘folk
gods’ like Pabuji, of whom there are many, have a more immediate place in the
lives of ordinary people than the big hitters like Shiva and Vishnu. Folk gods
have a similar role to that of saints in Roman Catholicism: they intervene in
the small, personal things in life.

Then a large, jovial man thundered into the room; one of
those people whose good-natured presence overrides everything around them, and
puts everyone at ease…….Pabuji epic…..a story that was not widely known……had
been passed down in his family for hundreds of years and it concerned an
ancestor of his, one Saira Bhargani……..In the 14th century, Saira
Bhargani was a landowner and trader living on the edge of a village called
Lankiye, to the west of Umerkot in what is now Pakistan. Saira had a herd of
camels, which had been imported from a distant land. At that time very few
camels had crossed the Thar Desert into what is now Western Rajasthan, and they
were considered to be very rare and exotic creatures over there. Even in Sindh
province, where Saira lived, camels were uncommonly seen, and having a whole
herd of them was the mark of a rich man with business interests involving the
trade routes to the Middle-East and North Africa.

One day, …….the son of a Rajput……Pabuji Rathore – a rustler
– had crossed the Thar Desert from his
brother’s kingdom at Kolu, and had made off with a few of Saira’s best breeding
camels……Saira …assembled a posse of his best men and they gave chase………Both
Saira and Pabuji….agreed to……fight on human terms, man-to-man…….Among Pabuji’s
retinue was a Charan poet by the name of Channan… a break in the battle was
declared to permit the two combatants to rest……..the wily Charan…..swapped
around their turbans where they lay beside the lake……. Neither noticed he had
put on his opponents turban………the act of wearing another man’s turban was the
equivalent of swearing a blood-oath of allegiance. It would be unthinkable to
wield arms against one another under such circumstances. The battle was halted
and the two men embraced…..There was still, however, a problem left to be
solved: the stolen camels. What could Pabuji give to his newly made brother…..in
exchange for the camels…..so it was agreed….The Charan and his descendents
would be given to Saira Bhargani in exchange for the camels…Professor Mehar ….had
read…..even to this day, a sub-caste of Charan poets were associated with
Muslim Sindhi nobles…..the Charan were traditionally Hindus. People wondered
how it came about that Hindu poets would sing the praises of Muslims……So that
was the true story of how Pabuji introduced camels to Rajasthan, said Professor
Mehar. The story related by the Bhopa priests of Pabuji travelling to Lanka,
defeating Ravana, and taking his camels was clearly nonsense. …..The story had
been written by a Charan poet…attached to the Rathore family. How could he
write of Pabuji as a camel rustler…….Professor Mehar told me there was also a
saying among Raika tribesmen…. ‘It means, When
a camel is unhappy it looks towards Lanka’. We all think of home when we
are unhappy, he said, but this was a mispronounciation that had crept in ……The
camels looked westwards, towards Lankiye……not southwards towards Sri Lanka………the
basic story sounded perfectly plausible…….

If I could change just one small thing about India it would
have to be the litter.

Colombo has a smell all of its own. It’s a dark, earthy,
fertile smell…..Its the smell of soil that can scarcely restrain itself from
letting things grow. Its jungles and vegetation mixed with a saline-and-ozone
hint of the seashore.

It is expressly forbidden to climb Kailash, and in modern
times this has never happened. Modern apocrypha states that nobody who has
ascended the mountain has ever been seen again.

The history surrounding Ravana’s lingam at Trincomalee takes a couple of fascinating twists…. The
existence of a Shiva temple on Swami Rock at Trincomalee has been well
documented down the centuries ….There has certainly been a temple ……rebuilt at
least a couple of times – on Swami Rock for thousands
of years, and it is believed to have been one of the oldest sites of continuous
worship anywhere in the world. That continuous worship came to an end in 1624.

Despite its isolated location, cut off from most of Ceylon
by dense jungle, the strategic importance of Trincomalee as a military base had
long been recognized by the seafaring imperialist nations ……Horatio Nelson …..considered
Trincomalee …….to be the finest natural harbor in the world….The Portugese had
been in control of much of Ceylon since the early 16th century….the
Portugese were notoriously intolerant of all religions besides Catholicism, and
regarded the worshippers of Shiva as savage heathen…the presence of a Shiva
temple – known as the Temple of a Thousand Columns – on Swami Rock……was well
known to be one of the richest in all of Asia ……The Temple ……was razed to the
ground and its shattered pillars and masonry were thrown over the cliffs into
the sea, or were re-used in the construction of the Portugese fort. The lingam given to Ravana, the object of
worship at the temple for eons, went missing

In 1950, shortly after the decision had been taken to
rebuild the temple, some workmen digging a well …..unearthed …..An image of
Shiva……one of the finest examples of Hindu metal casting in existence. Another image
of Shiva was one of the oldest and probably Mongolian in origin.

…..Wilson went diving….in the waters off Swami Rock…noticed
a carved stone pillar on the seabed….The pillar proved to be a lingam of great
antiquity, and was soon authenticated as Ravana’s long-lost lingam. It was also restored to the newly
built temple on Swami Rock. ….Ravana’s ancient lingam – bestowed upon him by Shiva shortly after he had invented
the ravanhattha, carried by him from Mount Kailash to the Kingdom of Lanka,
revered for thousands of years by the inhabitants of Lanka, dumped in the sea
by the Portugese, and retrieved hundreds of years later by Mike Wilson – was
still housed at the Koneswaram temple on Swami Rock at Trincomalee

The truth is beyond
letters and words and books.

-The Lankavatara Sutra

…everybody in Sri Lanka seems to be very good-looking.

The Sri Lankans have always been a remarkably literate
nation, leaving detailed records of their history…In the 5th
century, a Buddhist monk named Mahathera Mahanama began to collect historical
records and compile them into a single volume which became known as the Mahavamsa (Great Chronicle of Ceylon).
The Mahavamsa begins in the 3rd
century BCE. This extensive work, written in the Pali language, was added to by
later monks …..forming a historical record spanning more than two thousand
years. The later chronicle became known as the Culavamsa. The Mahavamsa
mentions a religious site on Swami Rock during the rule of King Mahasena in the
3rd century CE, when Trincomalee was still called Gokarna.

….Sri Lankans are just so disarmingly polite and friendly.

Most of Sri Lanka is immaculately clean and tidy.

….in folklore and Hindu scripture, ‘Lanka’ has never been
one of the many names that Sri Lanka has actually possessed…The only place in
Sri Lanka, notes Sankalia, that has ever been known as Lanka (or Illankurai in
Tamil) is a tiny and ancient port, still in existence, on the North East coast,
just to the South of Trincomalee.

…..Samuel White Baker. He concluded that: ‘Bathing is a
great enjoyment but the pleasure in such a country is destroyed by the
knowledge that sharks are on the lookout for you in the sea, and crocodiles in
the rivers and tanks…’

….I had found no genuinely old references to the existence
of any historical ruler of Sri Lanka by the name of Ravana….The Mahavamsa chronicle makes no mention of
him. The chronicle admittedly records Sri Lankan history from only 300 BCE onwards.
But surely some passing reference should have been made to such an important
historical figure …..The later Culavamsa
chronicle mentions Ravana only passingly as a figure in the Ramayana. In fact, it is not until about
the seventeenth century that Ravana is independently mentioned in Sri Lankan
literature at all……the Ramayana
really does not occupy anything like the position in the collective
consciousness of the Sinhalese as it does for the Tamils and Indians in
general.

But the Ramayana
does have a place in the oral folk traditions of the Sri Lankans. In rural
communities the ancient occult ritual the Kohomba
Kankariya, or Devil Dance, has been performed for more than fifteen hundred
years…..During the rites, various oracl folk-tales are recited, including parts
of the Ramayana. In this folk-Ramayana, Ravana is presented in quite a
positive light…..for many Sri Lankans, the status of Ravana as an evil demon is
merely the spin put on the tale by the victors in an ancient conflict.

Demon worship has a long history in Sri Lanka. There are two
definitive books on the subject…..neither of which even mentions Ravana among
the many demons worshipped, appeased, and feared on the island…….

…..the LankavataraSutra…..its one of the central
scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism…..the Ravana mentioned in the Sutra – who invited the Lord Buddha to
Sri Lanka - is rather different from the
demon of Hindu mythology….it is believed to have been written down around 2-300
CE… the first Chinese translation was made in 420 CE….the Lankavatara Sutra travelled with missionary monks from Sri Lanka to
India where it was translated into Sanskrit….several Chinese translations were
made between 420 and 704….and most of which contain the so-called ‘Ravana
chapter’ ….. The Lankavatara Sutra was
the onlytext that Bodhidharma
considered to be absolutely essential. His teaching of it became the basis of
what would become known as Ch’an Buddhism – Ch’an being derived from the Pali
word for trance, dhyana. Ch’an
Buddhism later travelled from China, via South East Asia, to Japan. In Kore it
became known as Son; in Japan, as Zen. The Lankavatara
Sutra is the very foundation of Zen Buddhism……the deplorable condition of
the Chinese monks at the monastery on Mount Sung…..Bodhidharma taught them a
series of martial exercises……on Mount Sung was the famous Southern Shaolin
monastery…..the Shaolin monks honed and perfected the movements they were
taught, developing the various styles of kung fu…..Shaolin kung fu travelled to
Japan…..where it was simplified and shaped into what was called Shorin-ryu (Shaolin) karate - …..Bodhidharma is also revered
by students of kung fu and karate as the founder of their martial arts….the
Ravana chapter ….is present in all but one of the earliest Chinese translations,
which make it 4th century at the latest…..the earliest existing written version of the Ramayana dates only from around the 11th
century, more than 600 years after
the earliest written version of the Lankavatara
Sutra. One of the earliest references to the existence of a written Ramayana was by Xuan Zang in the mid-7th
century

Indians have a national genius for subsuming, for
integrating, for assimilating, on all kinds of levels.

Jesus said, ‘Have you
discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end?’

The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

As we weave our way around Jaipur picking up passengers, it
moves from standing room to scarcely breathing room only. But there is none of
the irritation that you might expect to encounter in a crowded bus or train in
Europe. People in India are used to being crammed together into small spaces
and always remain good natured in such situations.